I consider the concept of employment insecurity and provide new evidence for 1997 and 2005 for many countries with widely differing institutional contexts and at varying stages of development. There are no grounds for accepting that workplaces were going through a sea-change in employment...

This paper examines whether subjective expectations of unemployment are reliable indicators of the probability of becoming unemployed, and investigates their association with wage growth. We find that workers' fears of unemployment are increased by their previous unemployment experience and by...

Using new job requirements data for Britain I show that there has been a rise in various forms of communication tasks: influencing and literacy tasks have grown especially fast, as have self-planning tasks. External communication tasks, and numerical tasks have also become more important, but...

We consider the links between training, the quality of labour and establishment performance, using a proxy for performance, commercial survival. We develop a model in which managers have varying beliefs about the efficacy of education and training, leading to potential variation in the optimal...

Many commentators have argued that "key skills" are becoming more important in modern workplaces. This paper draws on a survey that uses a methodology based on job analysis to measure skills at work, and estimates their implicit prices using a hedonic wage equation. The main new findings are...

I investigate evidence concerning two indicators of the pressure of work, namely work hours and the intensity of effort during work hours ("work effort"). Interest in both is motivated by efficiency and welfare considerations, but analysis is typically attenuated by poor measurement. I first...

The paper investigates the impact of different types of training on the mobility expectations of workers, using two new data sets, one of individuals the other of firms. The innovation is that the data incorporate measures of the degree of transferability of training, improved information on the...

I investigate possible explanations for work intensification, using four British data sets. I conjecture that an important source of work intensification is effort-biased technical change (EBTC), which enhances the productivity of high effort workers relative to that of low effort workers. EBTC...

We assess the stability of the wage structure in an economy experiencing substantial economic changes. We find that the structure of inter-industry wage differentials remained remarkably stable in Brazil in the face of major shocks.

Employees and their line managers may have different perceptions of the skills used in jobs. We carried out a survey aimed at explaining such differences, in respect of verbal, physical, problem-solving and planning skills, the qualifications required to get the job, and indicators of the...